Monday, 11 February 2013

Ice Warriors To Return In The Spring

The Ice Warriors will be returning to Doctor Who this year, it was announced today.

In an online report, the magazine SFX said that the iconic monsters would be back on our TV screens in the third story of the second part of Series 7. Written by Mark Gatiss, the episode is set on a submarine.

We wanted to bring them back because they're wonderful! In the mix of stories that we were planning for this year it felt as if doing something very bold with a monster that hadn't been seen for a while would be really cool. Mark is an enormous fan of the Ice Warrior stories and came up with the idea. The sense of a monster of that scale and that size trapped in a really small, contained environment such as a submarine was a really brilliant story to be able to tell.

The Martians have appeared in the show four times so far. They debuted in the Patrick Troughton story The Ice Warriors in 1967 and were last seen in 1974 in the Jon Pertwee story The Monster of Peladon.

Talking about their design, Skinner said:

We've had a huge amount of fun going back to the traditional designs and recreating them, bringing the Ice Warriors back to life again. They were such a beautiful original design, and are genuinely really scary in terms of what they look like as they’re coming towards you in that armour.

As reported last week, The Ice Warriors is to be released on DVD on Monday 26th August, but it is unknown as yet if the missing episodes two and three will be animated for it. It will, however, include the condensed reconstruction of both those episodes, which was on the 1998 VHS release.